Tapas Marketing: why your growing list of tactics is a positioning problem

I ran into a friend a few weeks ago who had been off travelling for a few months. As part of her trip, she had done one of my bucket list items, walking the full Camino de Santiago, the pilgrims' way in northern Spain.

As she was telling me about it, my mind drifted off thinking about tapas for dinner every night, that wonderful heavy sleep after a full day's walking, the peace of no distractions but a beautiful view and contented progress at the end of the day. She said the best thing was the simplicity of the day: getting up early, knowing the only mission was to walk the set number of kilometres, carry your backpack, refuel for lunch and get to that night's destination. And she never had to wonder which way to go. The whole route is marked with yellow arrows, painted on walls, posts and kerbstones.

The thing that stuck with her was how much overwhelm there is every day in modern life: distractions, ways to be contacted, ways to solve things. She hadn't realised how much she needed that simplification to recharge.

The vision of throwing on a backpack, walking boots and most importantly tapas came back to me a few weeks later after a couple of prospect calls with some founder CEOs.

The list every founder CEO brings

The paralysis of where to start with marketing, what the right thing to invest in and do at key points of your business, is something that frequently comes up when I am listening to CEOs to diagnose where they need help. Some have started by outsourcing to an outbound sales team to get their sales machine moving. Others have hired marketing agencies to create materials and run digital marketing.  What they have in common is not knowing what good looks like, what their team (if they have one) should be measuring and why, or whether they have the right people in place. Many are comfortable admitting they don't know what they don't know when it comes to marketing, and it's usually at that point in the conversation that the question comes: 'should we focus on a podcast/newsletter/more paid advertising/buying data/x channel/x tactic?'

There is always a hope there is a silver bullet. One channel or tactic which will make the marketing machine sing and whir into life and deliver brand awareness and leads like never before, along with sales and marketing alignment.

I've started to hear that list differently. When nobody has decided who you're for and why they should choose you, there's no filter. Every channel on the list looks like a reasonable bet, so overwhelm is the natural end point and spending money starts to feel like progress.

Types of Technical Debt

Not all technical debt is created equal. Deliberate technical debt involves conscious decisions to take shortcuts for strategic reasons, while inadvertent debt emerges from poor design or lack of expertise. Recognizing the type of debt helps determine the appropriate management strategy.

Why the list keeps getting longer

There are so many marketing channels and tactics. When Scott Brinker first mapped marketing technology in 2011, he counted 150 tools. His 2026 count is 15,505, roughly 100 times more. Budgets haven't moved with it: Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey puts marketing at 7.8% of company revenue, almost unchanged on 2025, and 56% of CMOs say they don't have the budget to deliver their strategy.

Meanwhile, the principles of marketing, the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion, first set out by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960 and popularised by Philip Kotler), have drifted into the background. Ask most people what marketing is and they'll describe channels and tactics, which is only the last P. This has been further eroded by the rise of digital marketing tools, performance marketing, AI to create content quickly (that is so often vanilla slop) and the belief that everything can be measured in marketing. My CIM Postgraduate Diploma drilled the 4Ps into me and it’s what I always go back to whatever the client, whatever the industry.  I understand why the question comes up: with so many ways to do marketing, surely something will stick and work?

It's like the overwhelm of which tapas to choose, or thinking that tapas (small, snackable tactics, quick to prepare, limited culinary skill needed) is the only Spanish food to eat, when there are deeper, more complex dishes that require skill, time and the right equipment, use simpler (and more cost-effective) ingredients and are more memorable, like a great paella. All this talk of Spanish food is making me hungry and I'm now more determined to tick that walk off my bucket list! 

Foundations first

Quick, accessible marketing tactics can be costly, and so can hiring an external agency without knowing how to partner with it, orchestrate its work or what good looks like. Getting someone to do something or committing to something is better than doing nothing, right? Unfortunately not. 

With more people than ever shouting at already overwhelmed buyers (much of it AI content), the foundations matter more than ever. If you are not clear on your positioning (what category you are in, how your customers see you and the proof you have or need to get), you can't build messaging that holds together across your channels and every tactic ends up costing more than it should.  I went into what good positioning actually looks like in Frozen Out back in August, so I won't repeat it here.

To do all of this you need the right people, processes and commitment to make decisions within the business to build a marketing engine that supports consistent growth and marketing ROI. It's a bit like investing the time to make a proper fresh stock that is the foundation of your paella, but can also go into soups and stews, quietly lifting every dish it goes into.

A test before anything goes on the list

Before any tactic earns a place, it has to get through four questions. If you can't answer the first two, no channel will fix it. 

1. Who exactly is this for and do they actually spend time there?

2. What would we say there that a competitor couldn’t say?

3. What proof do we have to back it up?

4. Who owns it and what would good look like in 90 days?

Why this matters more under PE ownership

More than ever, PE firms need their portfolio companies to have clear evidence of a repeatable, scalable marketing engine that aligns with sales and is not dependent on one superstar seller. The maths has changed. Bain's 2026 Global Private Equity Report sums it up as "12 is the new 5": a deal that needed 5% annual EBITDA growth to return 2.5x a decade ago now needs closer to 10 to 12%. Holding periods have stretched to around seven years and Bain flags the middle of the hold as where value creation most often gets lost. There's no room in that for budget spread across six channels to see what sticks.

You can have a much more consistent and effective sales team when they're clear on positioning, the category and messaging that comes to life through sales enablement and aligns with marketing activity that supports growth at all stages of the customer life cycle. 

It also works when there's no marketing team to speak of. Campaign plans stall when nobody is there to run them, but agreed positioning changes how the leadership team talks on every sales call from the following week. And when a buyer's diligence team eventually asks which parts of your growth are repeatable, "we tried a bit of everything" is a hard answer to give.

It doesn't need to take lots of time to first understand what you are doing, what's working, what's not, where the gaps are and what good looks like, before investing in getting your positioning right, then selecting the best channels and content. Then put it to work straight away on one thing (a homepage, a sales conversation or a single piece of content) so you see it working within 30 days, instead of receiving a framework and a handshake. Taking the time to stop, reflect, diagnose and then move forward will save you time, money and frustration in the end.

Follow the yellow arrows

Back to my friend and her Camino. Nobody walking it is handed a map of every possible path. There's a yellow arrow on a wall or a kerbstone, and you follow it to that night's bed (and, if you've timed it well, the tapas and a large glass of Rioja). Good positioning does the same job for a marketing plan: it tells you which way you're walking, so you can stop weighing up every path.

What's on your list at the moment? I'd love to hear which tactic you're being told you can't live without. And if you'd like a second pair of eyes on which ones earn their place, just let me know.

Photo by Agent J on Unsplash